Hi! I'm Jaeheon Shim, a computer programmer and technology enthusiast who lives in Columbus, Indiana. I like contributing to open-source development projects on GitHub, working on my own web-based applications, and writing articles on my blog Learn The Technology. In my free time, I manage CAMEO's public website and provide free tech assistance to friends and family :).

Find What You’re Looking For With These 5 Google Search Tips & Tricks!

October 30, 2018

Do you constantly get frustrated trying to find information using Google Search? Do you sometimes feel like Google is stupid and cannot understand anything you search in it? Do you constantly spend more time than necessary in order to find answers to simple questions? This article is the solution for you. There are tips and tricks you can use when performing a Google search on the internet to make things go quicker and without a headache! Read on to find out more about these tips and how to use them correctly.

1. Searching a specific site for keywords

If you already know the website that your information is going to be on, this trick can make your life so much easier. You can do this by using the site: keyword.

This is how you search a specific site: First, you type in whatever you want to search for. Keep in mind that since some websites may contain less content than others, you should keep your searches more generalized when using this method. Then, enter “site:” and input your site address after that.

Here’s an example:

As you can see, using this method only returns search results from the site specified after the “site:” tag. This can be useful when you are searching for information that you know would be found on a specific website.

2. Exclude specific words from your search results

Do you ever make a search on Google for a book, and can only find results for the movie version? I know I have, and it can be pretty frustrating. Fortunately, this trick exists to help narrow down your search results by excluding searches that contain keywords that are chosen by you.

You can remove search results with words you don’t want like this: First, enter your search query. Then, add a dash “-” before any words you want to exclude from your search. For example: “the outsiders -movie” would return all search results for the book “The Outsiders” and exclude the movie versions of the book.

Searching for the outsiders book versionThis is the result when I don’t use the “-movie” to exclude movie versions.

You will soon notice that being able to use the dash (“-“) in order to exclude certain keywords will become super helpful for you.

3. Look for an exact phrase

If you ever feel like Google gives you everything except what you want, you should use this method. Since Google uses keywords in order to process its searches, it’s not very good at finding exact phrases on the internet unless you specifically tell it to.

To tell Google to search for exact phrases, you just need to put quotation marks (“) around it: it’s as easy as that! For example, to only find results that contain the phrase “Houston, we have a problem” I would search “Houston, we have a problem”.

Using double quotes to find exact phrases

4. Search for a filetype

This trick can really help you if you’re looking for that digital book online. Basically, using this method limits the search query to only certain file types. Why is this useful you ask? When looking for something that you know the format of – whether it be text, audio, or video – you can find it much faster than having to scroll through junk you don’t need. It is very simple to use this method. All you have to do is add your search query, followed by “filetype:” then the file suffix (pdf, jpeg, mp4, wav). Here’s an example query:

the life of pi filetype:pdf

As you can see, the first Google Search result is a pdf version of the book “Life of Pi”.

5. Shop efficiently with a number range

You are probably aware that you can set the price range when shopping to make sure that you don’t get results that are too expensive or too cheap to be good (Ahem… “www.wish.com”).

Amazon

You usually set your price threshold in the online shopping service of your choosing. But doing so limits your searches to only the ones that shopping service offers. Why do this when you can just set your price range in the Google search itself?

To search for a number range, enter in your search query, followed by your minimum value, then two periods (..), then your maximum value.

Laptop $700..$1200

Although this is one of the lesser known Google search tricks out there, it still pays off to keep this in mind next time you do your shopping online.

Did learning about these 5 helpful tips improve and decrease the time you spend searching on Google? Share your thoughts in the comments section of this article. If you think that someone else would find this article helpful, you should share it with them too!